


Credit Where Credit's Due

by Littlewinns



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-23 09:02:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11399385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Littlewinns/pseuds/Littlewinns
Summary: After defeating the Daxamite invasion, Winn goes over to L-Corp, to thank Lena for a job well done.[Edited for wider-accepted spelling of Zakkarian Ale, plus minor grammar issues.]





	Credit Where Credit's Due

**Author's Note:**

> Just trying to pin the character dynamic down here, as I've been waiting for it since last November.
> 
> Also, this is the first time I've ever published a fic, so feedback is welcomed.

“Hi?”

The voice jolted Lena Luthor out her thoughts. She’d known she’d had a late appointment this afternoon, but events of the past week had gotten centre-stage in her mind. She hadn’t even heard the young man come in.

“Your, uh, assistant let me in, Ms. Luthor," he said, fumbling in his satchel. He pulled out a leather ID wallet, and held it up at shoulder height.

“Winslow Schott, Junior. D.E.O.” He said, as though even he wasn’t really sure.

Lena wasn’t sure which was more bizarre: that Winn, who’d she’d worked literally side-by-side with twice now, the last time in this very room, not one week previously, thought it was possible she wouldn’t remember who he was; or that, as an agent for a clandestine government organization, he’d still felt it was necessary to make an appointment.

“Yes, Winn, I know who you are.”

Winn laughed quietly to himself, then stopped when he saw her expression. Was there a joke here she wasn’t in on?

“Sorry,” he said, remains of a grin still on his face. “I never get to show anyone the badge. I’m not even sure why we have them, to be honest.”

Lena gave a little sigh, and closed her laptop. She wouldn’t say Winn was one of the smartest men she’d ever met, even though merely being able to keep up with her at all meant that he clearly was; but he was definitely one of the most useful, which was a rarer quality. Smart men were like sand on a beach. _Useful_ men were like gemstones.

But he did seem to have trouble getting to, or staying on, the damn point; which meant they'd probably be here for a while.

“So,” she said, gesturing towards the chair opposite, “how can I assist the D.E.O. today?”

Winn approached her desk, and rested the satchel on it, pulling out a semi-ornate green bottle. “I’m not actually here on business,” he said, placing the bottle on the desk, and walking over to the sideboard where her decanters lived.

“Then why-“ 

“To show my appreciation,” he said, bringing over two whisky glasses, and setting them down on the desk.

“For?”

“A job well done.” He uncorked the bottle, and filled the glasses with… she didn’t know what it was. It was the colour of chorizo oil, and fizzed lightly.

“You wouldn’t know it,” Lena said, eying up the drink as he pushed a glass over to her. “Have you been watching the news?”

He shrugged. “Ah, that just comes with the job. I mean, yeah, you start out, you think, you know, ‘hey, I just invented tights that can survive two minutes in molten lava without laddering, do I get a medal?’, but you learn that what we - you and me - do pretty much runs on an ‘I’ll buy you a drink’ economy. Well, a ‘let’s get a drink’ economy, anyway, so…” he said kindly, gesturing towards the bottle, as though it were an explanation.

He raised his glass in a toast, and Lena tapped her glass to his.

“That’s it?” she asked as he sat down, sipping his drink. She sipped in kind, and immediately regretted it. The drink was honey-sweet, with a hint of chilli, of all things; but it also had the bitter tang you tasted in sparkling mineral water. It was also at least as strong as wine. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, but it had to work really hard to convince you.

“What do you mean?” Winn asked.

Lena swallowed. The flavour lingered in her mouth, putting her on edge. “My mother. Cadmus. Taking a victory lap off the back of our work, like she’s always done.”

He shrugged again, trying to laugh it off. “I’m not a fan, but I’m not gonna fault her for having a successful strategy-”

“You’re OKAY with this?” she asked, astonished.

“No. NO. I’m not-” he said, taking another sip as he collected his thoughts. “These people kidnapped my girlfriend. They _murdered_ people I gave jukebox money to. The fact that they’re now a-” he paused, waving his empty hand while searching for the right word “-‘legitimate’ political force isn’t something that was on my wishlist.”

Lena took another sip of her drink. She managed to convince herself it was improving. “Because she’s taking credit for what we did!”

“Is she?” Winn replied. “What did we do, really? We were given a chemical weapon designed by a megalomaniac sociopath - no offence, Ms. Luthor,” he offered in apology when he saw the look Lena was giving him for talking about Lex that way, but making it clear he didn’t really mean it, “then modified it _slightly_ , to the specifications of a genocidal terrorist - again, no offence, I know how much her opinion means to you - and then let it be used for, basically, its original purpose. We killed at least one person. Banished the other Daxamites forever, including one of my best friends. You, me, Supergirl too, we did that. And by doing it, we validated everything that she and Lex believed in.”

“I’m not saying that we’ve ‘become Death, Destroyer Of Worlds’, nothing like that; it was a job that needed doing, and we did it well, and we can be, I dunno, proud of ourselves, or whatever, for doing it; but maybe it isn’t something we should want a parade for, you know?”

He drained his glass, slammed it back on the desk a little harder than he meant to. “Sorry,” he said to the glass, holding his hand up in defence, as though it might jump off the desk and attack him. He looked up at Lena. It was the first time since he’d entered the office that he wasn’t smiling. “Sorry.” He got up out of the chair, and started pacing, slowly, stopping to pretend to look at the artwork on the walls.

“Mon-El was your friend?” she asked, rising out of her chair. She’d known Mon-El, briefly; both as Kara’s boyfriend Mike, and as her own almost-husband, the Crown Prince of Daxam. She hadn’t gotten a bad impression of him in either persona, but the fact that he’d had two personae at all - and what he’d probably been using them for - had left a bad taste in her mouth. 

“Well, he always bought the first round at the bar. Ok, lot of the time he’d get Zakkarian Ale-” he said, nodding to the glass in Lena’s hand as she walked over to him, “-which is, you know, kind of a mixed bag, ‘cause it means getting up and buying the second round stops being on the list of tricks you can do for a while.”

Lena took another sip, starting to understand why he’d brought the peculiar drink. “You know he was kind of an asshole, right?” she said, tentatively.

“That’s not an unpopular opinion, and it’s not, you know, without merit; but that doesn’t mean I want him to die alone in a lifepod somewhere, you know?” The smile had returned to Winn’s face, just a little. “You of all people should know how complicated people can be.”

He was right. She did know. “Do you?”

“Uh,” he said, walking back to the desk, and pouring out another glassful of ale. “I would say I’ve got an inkling. Why’d you ask?”

“You talk about how much Lillian’s opinion means to me, like it’s simple. Like I shouldn’t care.” Lena said, staring into her nearly empty glass. She sat down on the couch. “Your mother’s proud of you, isn’t she?” 

“I don’t even know if my mother’s alive,” Winn said, sitting next to her, refilling her glass.

Lena laughed. He must have been joking, surely. Then she saw his face. He wasn’t _sad_ , as such, there was still a trace of a smile on his face; but he was definitely serious. “She left when I was eleven,” he said. It didn’t explain anything, but Lena had to assume that was the point.

“Your dad, then,” she said, in a forced upbeat tone. “There must be a Winslow Schott, Senior out there somewhere, tinkering in a workshop-”

“Yep. Van Null Maximum Security prison,” he said. “He was arrested about… nine hours before Mom left. He escaped last year, so, you know, he’s not allowed to have tools anymore.”

Lena tried not to panic about the hole she was digging for herself. “Foster parents?” she said, hopefully, as she walked over to the couch.

Winn, whose smile had acquired a kind of Zen quality, shook his head. “Not that I’m in contact with.”

Lena looked back down at her drink, a little stunned. “Well, then. Look at the little rich girl feeling sorry for herself,” she said quietly.

“You’re allowed,” he said. Lena glared at him. She shouldn’t have, she knew; it was instinctual, and defensive, and entirely what Lillian would have told her to do; but, there it was.

“I mean, it’s okay,” he said, reassuringly, as he shifted positions, reducing the two feet between them on the couch to a solid 18 inches. “I’m a foster kid, you’re a foster kid; and we all have our own version of the same pain. Okay, yours is a little more… specific than most, but that doesn’t mean you’re not entitled to it. Hell, I _lived_ with kids that had worse stuff going on than me, and I’m still entitled to mine; and even then, all our crap pales to being on the last lifeboat from an exploding planet and watching everyone you knew before the age of thirteen die a horrible death, so I think maybe, we shouldn’t care so much about how our problems compare with other people’s.”

The look on Winn’s face suggested that he wasn’t finished. “But?” she said.

Winn considered his words carefully.

“However,” he said, gesturing with his glass, “maybe, what with being a successful CEO of a major technology firm; you know, the TED talks, being the youngest female winner of the Perez-Wolfman Robotics Prize, the Nobel Prize you’re gonna get for the transmatter portal - great work on that, by the way, I’d love to see it up close - _and_ having a friend in the press willing to write almost-but-not-entirely content free puff pieces about you any time you want; then _maybe,_ just maybe, it can be okay that you’re not your mother’s favourite." 

It seemed like he had finished. But not quite.

“Especially since she is, you know, kinda terrible.”

“You think it’s that easy?” Lena asked.

“Yeah. Probably. If you want.”

“I meant about the Nobel prize.”

A guilty look crossed Winn’s face. “Okay, no. Getting that thing you’ve got in the desert out of private hands is pretty high on the D.E.O.’s to-do list; but that’s just government bureaucracy, you know? But if it were up to me, Ms. Luthor, you’d be on the way to Stockholm already.”

“The Earth got invaded, Winn.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it; there’s teething troubles in any scheme.”

Lena sat in silence for a while. “Winn?”

“Yeah?”

“Can we go get an _actual_ drink?” she said, tersely.

“Oh, God, yes,” Winn said, enthusiastically putting the stopper back on the bottle, and standing up, a little too quickly. He held out his arms, to steady himself on nothing. “We probably shouldn’t drive there.”

“I’ll get my driver to take us,” Lena said, standing, and getting her coat from the closet. “And then I can call Kara Danvers to join us, and you can tell her what you think of her writing,” she said, smugly.

“Yeeeeaaah,” Winn said, slowly. “I’m actually one of Kara’s best friends, I’ve read most of the drafts of her work, I’ve corrected some of the spelling.” He clasped his hands together in prayer. “Please, do not let her know that I said that.”

“Oh,” Lena said, disappointed. “It’s just- she’s never mentioned you.“ Winn looked unfazed by this. He’d clearly heard a lot about Lena.

“Well, you’ve been going through a lot, and I’m a lot to take in, when you first meet me. Probably didn’t want to spring me on you, is all,” he said, apologetically. “Plus, there’s James, big history with Lex there, and… she tries to accommodate everyone, you know.”

“I’m sure,” she said, handing him his satchel. She wanted to ask Winn what he knew about Mon-El and Kara, but what Winn said took over her thoughts. _She tries to accommodate everyone,_ he’d said. And it was probably true. It sounded a lot like Kara.

But, somehow, accommodating everyone had meant leaving her out.

“We should still call her, though; she’s a little bummed right now. Could use a pick-me up.”

“Hmm. Yes,” she said. However Lena was feeling, it probably wasn’t the night to tell Kara about whatever Mon-El had been getting up to with Supergirl.

“Lyra and James, too,” Winn said.

“Of course. I’d love to meet more of Kara’s friends,” Lena said, deliberately, as she walked to the door. Then she stopped.

“By the way,” she said, poking Winn in the chest, “I’m not just the youngest _female_ winner of Perez-Wolfman, I’m the youngest _ever_.” She’d been particularly proud of that. Lillian had been _so mad_ when she’d given the prize money to the runner-up.

“Nope. Couple years later, a fourteen-year-old dumpster diver showed up, won,” Winn said, a little quicker than he’d meant to.

“Oh,” she said, starting back toward the door. It was disappointing, although she knew full well it was years ago, and nothing should matter less to her now than an under-19s science prize. Not even a national one.

“Wait, why would you even know that?” she asked, walking through the door as Winn held it open. Winn evaded her gaze as she looked back.

“Sorry.” he said. It took a moment for Lena to figure out what he was apologizing for. Even then, it didn’t really make sense, but then, to Winn, it probably did. He’d beaten kids three, four years older than him, beaten _her_ , even, in a national robotics competition. If he’d been a Luthor, Lillian would have sung his praises from the rooftops, and rightly so. Instead, he felt guilty, because he’d taken something away from her.

But he couldn’t have known what she was thinking, right?

“Winn?” she said.

“Yes, Ms. Luthor?” he replied.

She thought for a moment.

“You should call me Lena.”

“Of course, Ms. Luthor.” Lena laughed as the door closed behind them.


End file.
